Family Values, Social Needs and Preferences for Welfare

DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES

IZA DP No. 6977

Family Values, Social Needs and Preferences for Welfare

Claudio Lucifora Dominique Meurs October 2012

Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit Institute for the Study of Labor

Family Values, Social Needs and Preferences for Welfare

Claudio Lucifora

Universit? Cattolica and IZA

Dominique Meurs

Universit? Paris-Ouest Nanterre and INED

Discussion Paper No. 6977 October 2012

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IZA Discussion Paper No. 6977 October 2012

ABSTRACT

Family Values, Social Needs and Preferences for Welfare*

This paper investigates the links between family values, social needs and individual preferences for welfare using data from the 2005 French "Generation and Gender Survey" (GGS). We analyse individual preferences, for financial assistance and the provision of care services, with respect to welfare support as opposed to within household production. The strength of family ties is based on individual's self-assessed family values (such as, duties, responsibilities and norms of reciprocity), both within the couple and between parents and children. We find a positive association between weak (strong) family values and the preferences for welfare state support (provision of domestic services). The relevance of family values is shown to be invariant to different socio-economic circumstances, such as: financial distress, bad health or family size. Using long term cultural determinants of selected ethnic and religious groups as instruments for family values, we also provide evidence for causal effects.

JEL Classification: J12, J13, I31, I38 Keywords: family values, preferences for welfare, culture, religion

Corresponding author: Dominique Meurs Universit? Paris-Ouest Nanterre B?timent G 200, Avenue de la R?publique 92001 Nanterre cedex France E-mail: dominique.meurs@ined.fr

* This paper was prepared while Claudio Lucifora was visiting the Universit? Paris-Ouest Nanterre. This study is part of a larger project on "Family" sponsored by the Universit? Cattolica (UCSC, Grant D3.2 - 2010). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at GSP conference (2009), at the AIEL conference (2011) and in seminars at UCSC Milan and University of Hannover. The data used have been kindly provided by INED.

1. Introduction

Family values and family ties are important institutions which, among others, affect various economic decisions. Human capital investment, as well as many other labour market and credit market choices - such as type of job, wages and career opportunities, home ownership and financial wealth - are taken within the family and strongly depend on family values. Although in the last few decades, in most industrialised countries, many things have changed in relation to female labour market participation, falling birth rates, increasing divorce and cohabitation rates, as well as erosion of family values; still the family, as an institution, is at the core of most economic and social behaviour (Goldin, 2006; Lundberg and Pollak, 2007).

In this respect, while in sociology there is a long standing tradition in the analysis of family organisation and behaviour (Durkheim, 1888; Elster, 1989; Esping-Andersen, 1999), in economics the relationship between family values and economic outcomes is more recent (Becker, 1981; Algan and Cahuc, 2007; Giuliano, 2007; Alesina et al., 2010). In a number of recent studies, strong family links have been shown to reduce female labour market participation, foster fertility, increase home production and reduce reliance on the market, facilitate risk pooling among household members and influence both civic engagement and political participation (Alesina and Giuliano, 2010; 2012; 2011; Ljunge, 2011). What has been less investigated in the literature is the role of family values in shaping preferences for welfare assistance. In particular, given that individuals and households face different types of social needs over the life cycle, which may or may not be of pecuniary nature, such as (just to name a few): child care, elderly support, unemployment and (negative) income shocks, it seems interesting to investigate to what extent household members prefer to deal with those needs within the family (direct care or income transfer), whether they do resort to the market (borrowing and buying services) or, finally, if they expect society (or the welfare state) to take care of them (public child/elderly care or welfare benefits). Family values, that is the reliance of family members on a set of norms of reciprocity within the couple and between parents and children, are likely to influence the need and desire to resort to the market or to society and the welfare state for insurance. Since strong family ties produce social insurance, it is argued that where family values are stronger, demand for welfare support and state intervention is lower. In this paper, we investigate the links between family values, social needs and preferences for welfare assistance using data from the 2005 French "Generation and Gender Survey" (GGS). The focus on one single country has the advantage to minimise confounding factors

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associated to institutional differences (taxation, structure of welfare) which may contaminate the relationship between family values and preferences for welfare assistance. Social needs cover both financial support and the provision of care services and for each of them individual's preferences are retrieved comparing welfare assistance with services provided within the household. Family values are measured using a wide range of indicators based on individuals' self-assessed measures of duties and responsibilities within the couple and across generations (such as, parents obligations vis-?-vis their children and vice versa), as well as reciprocal care assistance or financial support. The contribution of this paper to the existing literature is as follows. First, we show that there is a positive association between weak (strong) family values and preferences for the provision of services by society or the welfare state (within the household). Second, while in the literature preferences for welfare and redistribution are usually identified with reference to rather general questions, we investigate several dimensions of social needs, such as: care for children or elderly, financial assistance for those in needs. We find a positive association between weak family values and preferences for provision of care services by society and the welfare state. To put it differently, strong family values are associated to preferences for the provision of such services and financial assistance within the family. Also, we find that different dimensions of family values correlate to different types of social needs, such as care and financial support. The association between family values and preferences for welfare assistance does not differ significantly across groups of individuals characterised by different socio-economic circumstances - such as credit rationing or large family size ? thus refuting the hypothesis that individuals value the family links more only when in need or when they are constrained. Finally, we address the issue of causality using long term cultural determinants of selected ethnic and religious groups as instruments for family values. Since culture and religious beliefs are grounded in the home country social norms or in religious beliefs and are persistent, we use them to identify the causal effect of family values on preferences for welfare or family support. In this respect, in line with previous findings, we find evidence that weak family values are causally related to preferences for welfare support, although in some cases estimates are less precise. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 presents a review of the literature. In section 3, we describe the data and the family indicators that we use in the empirical analysis. The main set of results is presented in section 4, while section 5 concludes.

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